If you know any of those 184,088 people, please ask them to move to Kyrgyzstan and never vote again.

Sheppard might have been the most unqualified candidate since the residents of Lejitas, Texas, elected Clay Henry, a beer-drinking goat, to be their mayor.

Actually, Clay Henry would be better qualified to be Orange County Sheriff than Sheppard. I mean, at least he hasn’t been arrested 13 times.

There are only two possible explanations for Sheppard’s impressive vote total:

A) We have 184,088 complete nincompoops living in our midst.

B) The power of partisan politics is dangerously blinding.

I prefer to go with B.

Mina and Joe Lopez are former Republicans who switched to the Democratic Party last year, but not in time to run as Democrats on the ballot.

So the letters next to their names on the ballot were NPA – No Party Affiliation.

That left Sheppard as the only candidate with a D next to his name. In predominately Democratic Orange County, that was good enough.

Almost 185,000 Democratic droids mindlessly went with the straight party-line ticket, though such partisanship is hardly a one-party phenomenon.

A lot of Republicans would do the same thing if given a choice between an NPA and an R.

People! We’ve got to do better than this.

Mina and Lopez were not impeccable candidates, but they were undoubtedly qualified. Mina was Orlando’s police chief and Lopez was a Florida Highway Patrol chief.

Sheppard billed himself the CEO of a venture capital firm. He had no real law enforcement experience, unless you counted those 13 arrests.

The charges ranged from battery to motor-vehicle theft to driving with a suspended license. Most were eventually dropped or dismissed, though some cases are still pending.

If that weren’t enough, Sheppard ran a laughably deceitful campaign. He posted fake tweets on his Facebook page purporting to show that Donald Trump endorsed Mina and Lopez.

Every Democratic leader in Central Florida cringed at the mention of Sheppard’s name. After Sheppard posted a photo of U.S. House member Val Demings on his website, the former Orlando police chief let her feelings be known.

“I would not endorse Darryl Sheppard for ‘Dog Catcher’ of Orange County for fear the canines would lodge complaints,” Demings wrote on her Facebook page. “He is TOTALLY unfit for the position he seeks, without even mentioning his criminal record. Perhaps he should learn how to OBEY the law [before] he TRIES to enforce the law.”

You’d think all that would leave Sheppard’s immediate family as his only supporters, but he can’t have 184,088 brothers and sisters.

The whole thing would be riotously funny if not for the fact being a sheriff is serious work. The Orange County Sheriff’s Office has 2,400 employees and a $250 million budget.

Do you want a guy like Shepard in charge of that?

Can you imagine Sheriff Rap Sheet gaining the respect of the rank and file?

One year they’re arresting him. The next year they’re having to salute him?

If you didn’t know better, you’d think the whole thing was an elaborate test by political scientists. They took the most incompetent person imaginable and put his name on a ballot to see how powerful one’s party affiliation is.

Well, the results are in. Sheppard came within a few measly percentage points of being the new sheriff in town.

I fear there is no cure for such mindless partisanship. I’m not sure why the sheriff’s race is party based in the first place.

Maybe that can be addressed, or 184,088 people will realize what they almost just did.